It makes no sense for Ondaatje to be anti-colonialist given his life and career.
He’d have done nothing and who knows what he’d be if not for colonialism.
And the thing is, he is part Dutch, hence his name. But the point that I could not get over in The English Patient, was the character of the Indian sapher(sp), the bomb detonation expert, left everyone, including his lover, because he could not abide that the bomb in Japan, because it was the responsibility of white people on “people of color”. That made no sense, since the common enemies were the Japanese, posed to strike India and of course, the Germans in Europe.
When I met Ondaatje, it was a talk with two “Post-Colonial” authors. I spoke to him, clearly struck by his genius, and being awfully cute (well, I think my picture of us shows this, lol) and at one point he grabbed my arm and took me to where the other author sat, a Caribbean man, very hung up on post-colonial authors, and told him to take me out to coffee.
Ondaatje’s last book, which I will not buy, has a boy on a ship bound from Ceylon to England, where he hears the conversations of other passengers, which include racist remarks against Indians. Oh, enough, already.
He’s affiliated with a Toronto University and has not lived in his native Columbo since school, I think. He has, apparently, other ways to show his disdain for Anglo-Saxon society.
Which by the way, is the excellent topic of Daniel Hannaman, the British representative to the EU we admire, how English body of laws, influenced our understanding of freedom and liberty, and how the English colonies were much better off being part of the English empire and how each of them have more in common with England and each other, than the basket case countries around them and what supplanted them.